Craft breweries are working with barrels and blending in exciting ways

An increasing use of barrels and blending in brewing is leading to some exceptional, out-there beers.

THERE IS an emerging approach to brewing now drawing attention, and it’s a million miles from the pale ales and lagers that dominate the beer landscape. It incorporates the art of blending. Even the biggest of breweries will blend batches of the same beer to achieve consistency, but this fresh approach more usually – or unusually – involves blending liquids that have been aged in barrels. They are then taken to new places by the use of bugs, fruits, spices and other atypical ingredients, or blends of old and young variations on a theme. Often, it involves all of the above.

Marrickville’s Wildflower Brewing & Blending, which has had a huge impact since launching two years ago, operates out of an old warehouse. Complete with rusted fittings from previous inhabitants and rows of barrels, it is reminiscent of breweries in northern France or the Belgian countryside.

Their flagship brews of Gold and Amber, and limited releases that often bear the names of saints (and the kids of founders Topher Boehm and Chris Allen) are produced at nearby Batch. They are then fermented at Wildflower and go into the 70

barrels on-site. Then the magic happens – magic that started with a house culture that was a combination of a Belgian saison strain and wild yeasts that Topher had collected from around NSW.

“Blending wasn’t the first thing that came about,” he says. “It’s a byproduct of our process. We have to [blend] to make our beers the way we want them to be.”

Unlike most brewers, Wildflower is not processing ingredients through sterile equipment that can control every stage and, more or less, predict the result. Instead, within each barrel, the mixed culture is allowed to create its own expression in tandem with the beer chosen to fill it. The skill comes in knowing when each one is ready to be emptied, which Australian wild ale (their preferred title) the results are best suited to, and which other barrels will combine harmoniously to create the desired outcome. “We’re not sitting there telling the barrels how they need to be,” says Topher. “We’re reacting to how they are.”

As for a typical blending day, he says the aim is to “choose the best and the most expressive” barrels at that moment. They’ll regularly taste from others, determining when and where they might be suitable, and tipping – or sending for distillation – those heading in the wrong direction. “There’s a huge amount of time spent just watching,” Topher says.

Patience – and knowing when to strike – is a crucial virtue for the growing number of brewers working in this way. In Tasmania, Two Metre Tall has been making blended wild ales and ciders for years, and Van Dieman’s Estate Ale project is another. In Victoria, Boatrocker, Hop Nation, La Sirene, 3 Ravens, Holgate and White Rabbit have been amassing thousands of litres of barrel capacity, often creating a broad palette of flavours and textures with which to build beers.

Victoria is also home to two other brewers that have barrels and blending at the heart of what they do: Future Mountain, which opened its doors last spring, and Ballarat’s Dollar Bill. “There’s no other way to get the level of complexity in beer,” says Ed Nolle, who runs Dollar Bill with his wife Fi. They have been releasing tiny batches of ciders, blends and farmhouse ales while working towards opening a cellar door on the land where they’ll grow their ingredients.

Ed was inspired by his old homebrewing buddy, who is now head winemaker at a leading winery and goes by the pseudonym Miguel Sanchez on Dollar Bill’s labels. The goal was to create beers that were close in character to wine, with wild and sour ales inspired by iconic European producers such as Cantillon, to display something of the ‘terroir’ in which they were brewed, aged and blended.

Like Wildflower’s Topher, who only sources barrels from winemakers he knows and trusts, Ed says barrel maintenance is key, also admitting that once the liquids he’s spent months conceiving are in oak, it’s really out of his hands. “We have no idea how they’ll turn out,” Ed says. “If we find something six months old that has a particular flavour profile or acidity we’re looking for, then we’ll use those barrels.” Meanwhile, the Dollar Bill beers that have attracted the highest praise to date are blends of liquids up to four years old.

Ed hopes to build a coolship and fill it with fresh, unfermented wort at his mate’s winery to pick up the yeasts and bacteria in the air. He also plans to source larger oak vessels and concrete tanks to slow the ingress of oxygen, and is keen to launch solera-style blends, something Wildflower has already commenced.

For Topher, the future is “less driven by creating new beers than making better beers” and finding more local organic hops, barley and whatever else takes their fancy. “It’s unlimited,” Ed says of this brave new world, albeit one with its roots in the Old World. “You can take it as far as you want.”